Civic and Economic Mobility

Overview

Our society has divested from the key transition period between adolescence and adulthood, especially for youth who are not part of traditional institutions such as colleges, stable employment, or families, and may experience challenges in multiple facets of their lives. This type of divestment has severely limited youth opportunity to develop into civic and political leaders and to experience economic mobility. Once young people exit high school and do not or cannot attend college, opportunities are very limited, especially for youth of color, to obtain career opportunities with growth potential.  In fact, our own experimental study about AmeriCorps volunteers inadvertently found that there are virtually no jobs available for youth without college credentials (Benenson, Hayat, Sullivan, Levine & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2016).

Currently, civic engagement, even deep, and long-term civic engagement such as youth organizing, is usually not viewed as a career or community development opportunity. However, young adults often gain relevant career skills when they immerse themselves in civic work, such as coalition-building, communication, project development and implementation, meeting facilitation, and problem-solving. Our evaluations of programs like YouthBuild and ServiceWorks have found that training and employment programs for young adults also teach valuable civic skills, and that in turn civic skills can improve young people's professional and academic prospects.

Our continued research into these intersecting mobilities focuses on what can be imagined at the community, network, and system level as opportunities for youth to gain skills and contribute to the cause they work on, but also gain credentials and marketable skills that can serve as a catalyst for the next steps that they envision for themselves, their families, and their communities.